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1:38am July 23, 2014

lichgem:

youneedacat:

lichgem:

There are so many ways to look like a person and people look at 99 percent of that and call it ‘ugly’ and I don’t understand

So much beauty in the world and people trash it to hell and back.

I may be really strange, but the people I find the most physically beautiful are often those that others call ugly.  And this is not a statement about my moral superiority or anything — it’s just the truth.  It’s just how I see people.  When I see someone very unusual-looking, I see beauty.  Just like when you see a tree that stands out because it doesn’t look like the other trees, it has a certain beauty to it.  So… someone with lots and lots of wrinkles, someone with permanent frown lines in between their eyes, someone whose face is shaped in a way others would call ugly, to me all those things are beautiful.  I think partly it may be because I’m faceblind and people who stand out from the norm are the only people I can recognize on sight, and that makes them beautiful to me.  But I think there’s more to it than that.  My idea of beauty is just different than the norm, very different at times.  Like sometimes I see a “beautiful” person as beautiful too, but most of the time an “ugly” person is beautiful to me.

I’m ugly by a lot of people’s standards because I have a unibrow and facial hair and a “pig nose” and a receded chin (it was double even when I was skinny, if I didn’t consciously jut it out on purpose) and I’m fat.  But when I look at myself in the mirror these days, I usually see beauty.  Not in spite of those things but because of them.

And I see beauty in almost everyone I’ve ever heard called ugly, and again not in spite of their features that are called ugly, but because of them.  

I know that beauty isn’t everything, and that it’s not necessary to see yourself as beautiful.  And sometimes I can go for that kick-ass attitude of “I’m ugly, get used to it, I’m not here to beautify your world.”  But at the same time I do appreciate beauty and I think beauty is found in a lot of places that people don’t expect it.  I think most “ugly” people are beautiful.  And I think people could learn to see that if they wanted.  I really do.

People like nature.  But I keep warning them, if there were anthropomorphic nature spirits, they would not look how you expect them to look… they would have all the variance of real trees and rocks and water, meaning many of them would look ugly or even disabled or both, to most people’s eyes.

One time I told a friend of mine about a country I read about where unibrows and facial hair like mine are considered a sign of extra femininity and seen as beautiful.  She was skeptical.  Her skepticism hurt.  It’s not that I wanted to be seen as feminine, gods know I don’t want that.  But to know there was a place where people saw me as beautiful, and then to have someone say “okay where did you read that, are you sure it exists, I don’t trust you to know the truth”, it hurt.  I think it was somewhere obscure in Europe, like a tiny little village in the mountains or something.

Of course my friend tended to go for ~evolutionary psychology~ of the worst sort when it came to explaining human behavior, so she would think that universally my appearance would be ugly.  Because she thought a lot of things were universal human behavior that were actually white American middle-class behavior as explained (and universalized) by badly-done evolutionary psychologists.

Anyway… I truly believe most “ugly” people are absolutely beautiful, and it’s not a choice I’ve made, it’s just how I see people naturally.  I wish more people could see people this way.  Not that everyone needs identical beauty standards, but there ought to be enough different beauty standards to go around, instead of everyone focusing on one particular (also white, Eurocentric, nondisabled, elitist) ideal.  I think there would be enough to go around if people weren’t programmed to see one thing and one thing only as beautiful.

And despite beauty not being everything, and despite every argument I’ve heard in that vein, I still think it would be good if everyone, regardless of gender etc., was recognized as beautiful by at least some people, including themselves.

I love being ugly in a kick-ass fuck-the-world’s-beauty-standards sort of way, but I love my ugliness being beautiful, and I don’t think that’s a contradiction unless you make it one.

All of this is so important.

I often wonder if it would hurt so much, to be considered unattractive, if we didn’t place so much value on looks, too. And if we didn’t act like people who don’t please our sense of aesthetics are doing something morally wrong just by looking the way they do. I think maybe still people would get a little sad, but it wouldn’t make us feel like our lives were hopeless because of it.

I often think, not about whether I’ll be loved for my looks, but whether I’ll be seen as a real person. If my hobbies and interests, paired with my looks, will damn me in people’s eyes. If I’m allowed to be assertive, or witty, or important in any way, or if people will be affronted by my nerve, trying to be someone when ugly girls should just fade into the woodwork. I think that hurts me about beauty standards more than the idea that someone might not be romantically interested in me. Especially because plenty of people HAVE been romantically interested in me, but rarely have people seen me in my entirety, or treated me with full respect.